The Metadata Era

1. Can a CEO lose his job over a data breach? Earlier this month, the board of directors at Target replaced its chief executive after a massive data breach that ultimately hurt the company’s bottom line. For a legal analysis of why the board had no choice, read this piece on the importance of having…

For those in IT too busy to read the 60-page Data Breach Investigations Report, Verizon provides the shorter executive summary. And to summarize the summary, they’ve come up with seven tips based on their analysis of over 60,000 security incidents. If I had to condense this list into a simple one sentence security mantra it…

In my previous enterprise search post, I gave you a taste of how indexes are used to return meaningful results to users. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that enterprise search is all about building, manipulating, and searching the inverted index I wrote about last time. In my oversimplification, I left…

There’s been a long standing dispute between the EU regulators and Google over whether it could be forced to remove links from its web search results. Today, the European Court of Justice issued a final ruling against Google. While this is being billed as a “right to be forgotten” victory, actually these words don’t appear…

1. In the unregulated world of social media, the FTC has become the de facto enforcer of privacy. Snapchat is the photo sharing service that promised customers their photos and videos would automatically self-destruct. On Thursday, they admitted to the FTC that photos don’t actually disappear forever. As part of the FTC settlement, Snapchat agreed to be monitored by an independent auditor for the next 20 years.

The SANS Top 20 Critical Security Controls (CSC) have become a widely accepted strategy for protecting organizations against the most common security risks. They take a practical view of security that’s based on protecting against real-world threats—“offense informs defense”. Developed and maintained by an international group of organizations, government agencies, and security experts, the controls…

When launching software in the get-it-out-the-door world of consumer apps, companies often give security and privacy a lower priority. Understandable, of course. It’s not that this isn’t considered, but it’s hard for many embryonic startups (and even some larger players) to implement privacy-by-design concepts when also having to deal with everything else. With that in…

Varonis DatAnswers provides any organization with the increased employee collaboration and productivity that comes from controlled access to their company’s “institutional memory” without sacrificing security.

1. EdTech startup with plans to collect and analyze data from US schools closes down over privacy concerns. Several key states ultimately passed laws to prevent school districts from sharing student data with outside services, resulting in this startup dropping out of the student database business. 2. The White House’s Big Data report also includes…